Wednesday, February 15, 2017

In her previous life, Mary Louise Dean worked to distill a boatload of information into just enough material to fit on a single printed page. The resulting "essence" was handed off to The Creatives to work on PR and marketing.
When Mary Louise retired, she returned to her home state of Kentucky, where she found a picturesque house in picturesque surroundings. In this appropriate setting, Mary Louise rekindled the art flame that was smoldering through the years. She began painting the landscape just outside her windows. She joined the local plein air group and painted scenes all around the Central Kentucky environs. Mary Louise honed her skills with oil on canvas. Treks to New Mexico were sketched, images rendered.

Mary Louise Dean, Sky Shadows, 36 x 36", oil on canvas

As she worked on her skill and her ability to distill the landscape, Mary Louise became increasingly aware of her personal vision. Working on large canvases (36 x 36") she began to paint from memory, letting her distinctly harmonious distillations shine through. Artist Edgar Degas said "It's all very well to copy what you see, but it is better to draw only what you see in memory. Then you reproduce only what has struck you, that is to say, the essentials..."*

Naturally, Mary Louise Dean has been practicing the distillation process for years. Now she has added the storytelling element. As Ms. Dean says herself: "My desire is to create art with the full illumination of all I know in the present moment--what I have learned, and what I have seen and what I know about myself...The work..is a blend of landscape abstraction and my search for a greater connection with the world. These are memory paintings about beautiful places with an invitation to the viewer to recall his/her own experiences." The result is a brilliant celebration of harmony.

I am very pleased that Mary Louise Dean's work will be on display with mine in our exhibit at MS Rezny Studio/Gallery through the month of March. I hope you will have the opportunity to experience her work.

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Over these past eighteen months or so, as I have been creating for the upcoming harmony exhibit, I have given a lot of thought to harmony...naturally! What exactly is harmony and what makes something harmonious? Why do certain notes work together, while other ones grate? Why are some colors yummy together and others vibrate violently against each other? Textures and pattern can hum sympathetically or jar us awake.

The bottom line, I have decided is that harmony is a completely natural phenomenon. That is the only way I can explain it. Getting to the underpinnings of what works together, you can find patterns that apply to more than one sense of perception. For example, the golden mean which is a way of determining pleasing proportions also shows up when considering intervals between pitches. A perfect fifth has ratio of 2:3 between the sound waves, like the golden mean*. The golden mean is based on the Fibonacci sequence, which is a sequence of numbers starting with 1 and adding the previous two numbers to determine the next: e.g. 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144... This pattern and proportion can be found all over in nature; in pinecones, nautilus shells, sunflower seed heads. Perhaps this is because of how things grow, unfurling.

So nature is the bottom line. Still, ideas about harmony have made shifts throughout human history. What seems discordant to humans can become accepted and desired later. Kay Gardner, in her book Sounding the Inner Landscape, speaks of intervals (and mode nomenclature!) that dance dangerously close to the divine, according to the earlier church. Now, our attitudes and ears are more open to the experience. Even with our relative openness now, we still find comfort in the fundamental harmonies that exist in nature.

Throughout my time of exploration, I have sensed the broadness of harmony. I have tuned into composers and artists and picked up on their individual harmonic sensibilities. Landscapes have sung in harmony. I have discovered that musical modes can align with energy centers of the body in interesting harmonies. When I asked Mary Louise Dean to join me in creating for this exhibit, she asked me what I meant by harmony. I had not thought so much about a definition, but I said it is about relationships. That definition is perhaps still the best.

Mary Louise Dean, Koi Pond, 36 x 36", oil on canvas

An interesting thing happened when Mary Louise showed me her work for the exhibit. Besides being thrilled by the visual delight before me, I immediately began to make pairings of our work. We were working in harmony without even knowing it!

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About Me

Standing in the woods, I am surrounded by companionable complexity. There are layers and layers of life, seen and unseen; known and unknown. And yet, much of life is bound by order and repeated pattern. My art work celebrates that sweet spot between chaos and order. In fact, it is created through a bit of chaos and order, made possible by mixing media: watercolor and pastel, and acrylic and oil pastel. You may see my work at MS Rezny Studio/Gallery, 903 Manchester Street, in Lexington, Kentucky's Distillery District (msrezny.com).

I enjoy sharing my ideas about life and art by teaching. My objective is to help others develop their own visual vocabularies; reliably creating the work they want to create. I offer classes and workshops using watercolor and pastel. The timing of classes and workshops is responsive to demand, and located at MS Rezny Studio/Gallery. I will post information on upcoming classes and workshops on this blog. You may email me: kathyreesjohnson@gmail.com